Melanie Baer Keeley has been working with plants professionally for over 40 years since receiving a BS in Horticulture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her career became focused on California native plants when she managed the Theodore Payne Foundation, promoting awareness of their conservation, culture, and endangerment. After moving to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, she worked with the National Park Service at Sequoia and Kings Canyon, performing ecological restoration of disturbed wildlands.   

Baer Keeley publicly shares her extensive knowledge of California’s diverse, unique native flora through her writings, classes, and botanical illustrations to encourage appreciation and conservation of these invaluable plants and their habitats. “Retired” as of 2024, she is currently developing Alta Vista Natives Nursery in Three Rivers, California, offering local genotypes as well as other heat- and drought-adapted natives to the wholesale and retail nursery trades. She also serves on the board of the Alta Peak Chapter of the California Native Plant Society and consults with the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies to remove invasive vegetation from the Kaweah River Corridor.

Dr. Jon E. Keeley is a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, an adjunct professor at UCLA, an Ecological Society of America Fellow, former program director at the National Science Foundation, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His research includes ecological life history strategies of plants from fire-prone ecosystems, fire-stimulated seed germination, invasive species, the taxonomy of Arctostaphylos, and biochemical pathways of photosynthesis in vernal pool plants. Keeley is the senior author of a 2012 Cambridge University Press book, Fire in Mediterranean Climate Ecosystems: Ecology, Evolution and Management, and he has over 400 publications, which have garnered more than 45,000 citations. He has spent sabbaticals in all five Mediterranean-climate regions of the world, and his research into fire management is of particular relevance as the planet faces ever-rising rates of extreme weather events. 

Photo courtesy of Melanie Baer Keeley.

Inaugural SCHS Pathmaker Award will be presented to

Katherine Pakradouni

The SCHS Pathmaker Award is a distinguished new honor in the Southern California horticulture industry, created to recognize individuals who break novel ground through excellence, innovation, and their commitment to continued progress. 

Our first Pathmaker honoree will be Katherine Pakradouni, in recognition of her past achievements and in celebration of her ongoing momentum and future promise.

Pakradouni is an LA-based native plant horticulturist and consultant who has worked for the Theodore Payne Foundation, Grown in LA, and the LA Parks Foundation, as well as the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, where she developed the native plant nursery for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing project. She currently runs her own business, Seed to Landscape, designing and installing innovative and collaborative urban habitat revitalization projects, as well as helping to catalyze new grass roots native plant nurseries in the region.   

Her aim is to create a world where biodiverse and ecologically vibrant landscapes become the norm, and the understanding of how to create and steward those spaces becomes accessible knowledge to all.